liberation theology
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Evangelical Christianity Is Literally a PSYOP
576,460 views Jan 31, 2026
US intelligence agencies have conducted a long-term psychological operation promoting Evangelical Protestantism.
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Liberation Theology is absolutely based. My interview with Colten: [
• Our Evangelical Christian Universities Wer...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2KI50nB7cs)
colten barnaby nov 4 2025 was cia PSY-OP SUBSTACK
was-the-pentecostal-boom-in-latin-america-a-cia-psyop
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This was not merely accidental alignment. It was intentional policy. The U.S. did this in several ways.
:{The first was through direct coordination with evangelical missionary organizations. One of the clearest examples is the Summer Institute of Linguistics, or SIL, the academic wing of Wycliffe Bible Translators. SIL specialized in going into remote Indigenous regions, studying unwritten languages, creating alphabets, and translating the Bible. These were trained linguists, many with graduate degrees. Their work, on the surface, was scholarly and humanitarian.
But during the Cold War, SIL received contracts and grants from USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was a core part of U.S. soft-power strategy abroad. In several countries, including Guatemala, Peru, Brazil, and Ecuador, USAID partnered with SIL to carry out literacy programs among Indigenous groups. These literacy materials often included explicitly anti-communist lessons woven into biblical stories. In Guatemala, SIL teams operated in areas where leftist guerrillas were active, and the military government, backed by the U.S., gave SIL extraordinary freedoms and protection because they saw the missionaries as tools to pacify Indigenous resistance.}:
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The third major mechanism involved what the CIA called “psychological operations.” U.S. information agencies like USIA produced materials portraying liberation theologians as Marxist infiltrators who wanted to destroy the Church. These were circulated to conservative Catholic bishops, Protestant leaders, and local elites. The CIA also supported radio networks like Trans World Radio and HCJB (based in Ecuador), which broadcast sermons across the continent preaching submission to authority, anti-communism, and personal salvation rather than social transformation. Historians have shown that these broadcasts increased sharply in regions where liberation theology was strongest.
And then there is Guatemala under Efraín Ríos Montt. If there is a single moment when evangelical Christianity and U.S. counterinsurgency fully merged, it is this period. Ríos Montt was a general who took power in a 1982 military coup. He was a born-again Pentecostal and a member of an American-affiliated charismatic church. His weekly national TV addresses sounded like sermons, mixing Bible verses with calls for total obedience to the state. His government carried out one of the worst genocides in Latin American history against the Maya. Ríos Montt was not just supported by the U.S., Ronald Reagan personally praised him as “a man of great integrity.” American evangelical leaders visited him, prayed with him, and publicly defended him. Meanwhile, Catholic priests who supported Indigenous rights were being assassinated or disappeared.
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Further Reading and Sources
For readers who want to investigate this history in more depth, the following books and primary source collections offer the most reliable and well documented accounts of the relationship between U.S. foreign policy, Protestant missions, and the suppression of liberation theology.
Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre. A detailed study of Guatemala and the Cold War with extensive analysis of how the U.S. opposed liberation theology and supported evangelical alternatives.
David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth. A careful examination of why evangelical missions expanded during military regimes and how that growth intersected with U.S. strategic priorities.
Phillip Berryman, Liberation Theology and The Religious Roots of Rebellion. Clear introductions to liberation theology and its political context.
Stephen Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America. Focuses on U.S. foreign policy in Latin America with discussion of religious dynamics under military regimes.
Linda Rabben, Unnatural Selection. Documents missionary involvement in Indigenous regions and the political implications of their presence.
Manuel Vasquez and Anna Peterson, Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas. A broader contextual look at how Christianity and politics interact in Latin America.
National Security Archive, Cold War in Latin America Collections. Declassified U.S. embassy cables, CIA reports, and military documents.
CIA CREST Database. Digitized declassified files related to psychological operations, USAID partnerships, and religious influence programs.
These sources provide the clearest window into how religious movements became instruments within larger geopolitical strategies across the Western Hemisphere.
This article was originally published by Kensington Koan; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.
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theology responds to such criticism with just one question. What part have you played in the effective and integral liberation of the oppressed? In El
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Salvador, thinkers like John Sabrino and Ignasio Aakuria related the suffering of the poor to the passion of Christ directly and the sin of oppressors to
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the sins for which he was crucified. The crucified people, that is the poor, are the historical continuation of Yahweh's
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servant whom the sin of the world continues to deprive of his human face.
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The powerful of this world continue to strip them of everything to snatch everything from them even their lives
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especially their lives. Jesus takes a very different approach to each group.
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He offers salvation to all and makes demands of all but in a very different way. He directly demands a radical conversion of the oppressor, an act of
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cessation from oppressing. For these the coming of the kingdom is above all a radical need to stop being oppressors.
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These theologians did not invent liberation theology from above. They put into words what Christian-based communities were discovering for
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themselves as they studied scripture in the shadow of military dictatorships, land monopolies, and US-backed elites.
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These communities did not just pray together. They examined the conditions of their lives. They asked why their societies were structured to benefit a
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small ruling class and what it meant that Jesus identified with the poor.
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Liberation theology took those questions seriously and treated them as a call to collective action, offering ordinary
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people tools to interpret their own oppression and to organize for land reform, workers rights, literacy, and
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democracy. You might see the problem with this. for the wealthy, the greedy,
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the powerful, aka the US empire. This movement encouraged those who suffered most under the existing political order
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to demand they be treated with basic respect. By the late 1960s, US intelligence assessments characterized
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progressive Catholic clergy as an increasingly disruptive force whose work threatened established political order
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in Latin America. A 1969 CIA memorandum warned that liberationoriented priests,
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sermons, and writings have already aroused the concern of conservative church officials and military leaders and predicted some clergy may be driven
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into alignment with leftist political groups. By 1971, President Nixon identified the deterioration of the
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attitude of the Catholic Church as the single most important event in Latin America over the previous decade,
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worrying that priests were now standing with the peasants and workers against the oligarchs and the armies. Yes, he
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actually said that the 1980 Santa Fe document prepared for the incoming Reagan administration declared that liberation theology represented Marxist
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Leninist forces using the church as a political weapon against private property and productive capitalism and
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called for US foreign policy to mount a counterattack on and not merely react against liberation theology. The US did
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use direct violence to manage its problem, and we'll talk about that. But with liberation theologies proponents having some protection from the Vatican,
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the US couldn't just take out everyone it disliked, at least. So, it chose an
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additional approach to liberation theology. It would dilute, replace, and counterprogram it. How might it do this?
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As a 1969 report by Republican politician and eventual vice president Nelson Rockefeller said, since the
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Catholic Church in Latin America raises the consciousness of the people, the US should give support to fundamentalist Christian groups. As I'm filming this,
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and which of these things I'm saying are are my actual words. All right, you've been warned. If SIL linguists were zealous, as they often were, the
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teachers imposed an evangelical order as a condition for the schooling and other material advantages they introduced.
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Where necessary, the teacher pastors concentrated dispersed populations around the schools, which tended to produce ecological and social
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instability. For decades, SEL told the Peruvian government that it would reconcile jungle Indians to colonization, that is to the loss of
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most of their land. According to Yaandrand, Sil has helped the Aguana face a new highway and colonization by one, anchoring them around the bilingual
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schools so that they not abandon choice land and flee into the hills as the elders initially advised. Two,
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convincing the teachers of the highways benefits through new trade opportunities. And three, by giving the Agorana a feeling for progress in the
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accumulation of material goods. As that last quote indicated, missionaries also introduced foreign trade goods, clothes,
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medicines, vehicles, building materials,
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and along with them a capitalist market economy and materialist consumerrist culture to indigenous people. This meant
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to break indigenous traditions of reciprocity as well as their community's self-reliance. Since control over trade
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goods, medicine, and schooling is so basic to missionary work, it is tempting to dismiss it as a coercive economic transaction, one which simply alienates
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native people from their culture and induces them to accept exploitation in the image of the suffering Jesus. In the
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marginal situation, Sil therefore enslaves native people to the trade good. Considerable economic power is
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concentrated in the teacher who becomes the agent of trade good dependency and is placed under pressure to break with
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the tradition of reciprocity. The population is more likely to require concentration around the school and the evangelical order becomes a condition
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attached to the trade good. SIL's own aviation service, Jungle Aviation and Radio Service, or JARS, also
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occasionally transported state officials in regions where leftist guerilla movements operated. JARS pilots were not
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CIA assets, per se, but they did operate in regions otherwise inaccessible to government forces, and their cooperation was certainly mutually beneficial.
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Finally, as if all that's not enough,
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SIL missionaries actively helped oil companies and the USbacked Ecuadorian government force indigenous people in
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Ecuador into reservations. The evangelicals under the strategic leadership of the more politically sophisticated SIL supported the oil
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companies and an ethnocidal Ecuadorian government policy of encouraging highland homesteaders that's referring to the missionaries to stake out parcels of land along oil company access roads.
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After consultation with the Ecuadorian military, Aka converts flying above the remaining band of uncontacted kin in SIL
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helicopters operating on Texico fuel were urged to put down their arms and join their evangelized kin at Rachel
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Saints Reserva Village. In similar frontier conditions, the American missionaries grandfathers had pacified the American West and placed the Indians
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on reservations. Now their grandchildren in the service of the same 19th century god proposed reservos for the shiwara
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and the aas. Imagine Ecuadorian native reservos a legal entity administered in
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effect by sil missionaries evangelical protestants and dictatorships under USbacked military dictatorships across
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Latin America. Progressive Catholics faced serious persecution alongside the people with which they organized. In
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1975, not long after Nixon's ruminations about Catholicism, Bolivia's Hugo Banzer, with advice from his Nazi
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security chief, Klaus Barbie urged his interior ministry to draw up a plan against liberation theology. Para worked
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closely with the CIA to draw up what would be known as the Banzer plan, which was a direct attack on liberation
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theology. Bolivian intelligence joined by the CIA and by the intelligence services of 10 other Latin American countries began to compile dossas on
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liberation theologists to plant communist literature in churches to shut down any progressive church publication and to arrest and expel foreign priests
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and nuns who believed in liberation theology. Things are about to get even heavier somehow in this video. So,
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content warning for a discussion of genocide and torture, like even a little bit more explicitly than we've already
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discussed. Uh, Eric, let's find a time stamp where people can skip to um after
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that specific discussion is over. Under Brazil's military dictatorship, which the US financially supported at an
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unprecedented rate at that time, the state sought to assimilate and eliminate the indigenous people in order to
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develop the Amazon. Some Catholic clergy advocated for the rights of indigenous people. So, Brazil's generals also
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railed against the church, even kidnapping and torturing church representatives. The regime killed at least 8,350
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indigenous people during the dictatorship. According to Brazil's National Truth Commission, in 1980s El Salvador, where 2026 USbacked
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concentration camps are currently located, groups of US-trained army and national guardsmen sexually abused and
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murdered Catholic nuns and priests. In Chile and across Latin America, dictator Austo Pinish's government and its allies, all backed by the USA at the
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time, carried out Operation Condor, a project which killed an estimated 50,000 civilians, disappeared 30,000 who were
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all presumed dead, and imprisoned 400,000 for being suspected communist
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sympathizers. Many thousands of these civilians were likely tortured. The United States provided the funding and
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inspiration for this project and the CIA specifically instructed Latin American security forces in methods of torture
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and bomb construction. While all of this was happening, evangelical Protestant leaders supported these dictatorships and they received some love in return.
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In December 1974, Chilean General Pinocha personally attended the dedication of the Hotbee Pentecostal Methodist Church Cathedral in Santiago,
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marking the first time a Chilean head of state had ever attended a Protestant service. 2 days earlier, approximately
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2500 evangelicals had gathered to publicly pledge their support for the Huta and denounce Chile's international
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critics. By September 1975, the Methodist Pentecostal Church had assumed the Catholic Church's traditional role
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of hosting the annual Tedum service, a patriotic ceremony attended by Pinocha and other government leaders. Billy
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Graham, who we were all raised to rever in evangelical churches, coordinated directly with Latin American military dictatorships. Between 1962 and 1974,
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Graham personally met with Brazil's dictator Ernesto Geel and other authoritarian rulers. He praised Chile's
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Augusto Pinochet as a great Christian leader. And then there is Ephraim Rios
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Mont. Eric, can you please record yourself saying this dude's name with the utmost disrespect?
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Yeah, Spanish names can be difficult sometimes. Um, I can help. Uh, here is how you pronounce that.
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Hope that helps. Thank you. If there was a single moment when evangelical Christianity and US counterinsurgency
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fully merged, it was this period in Guatemalan history. Rios Mont was a general who took power in a 1982
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military coup. He was a born-again Pentecostal and a member of an American affiliated charismatic church. His
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weekly national TV addresses sounded like sermons mixing Bible verses with calls for obedience to God and the
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state. His government carried out one of the worst genocides in modern Latin American history against the Maya and
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the US financially and spiritually supported him. Good old Ronald Reagan praised Mont as a man of great integrity.
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I know that President Rios Mont is a man of great personal integrity and commitment.
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Jerry Fwell openly supported him. Pat Robertson interviewed the dictator on his TV show, The 700 Club. Ephraim Rios Mont who was uh the president there.
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He's a terrific guy. He was with the Elver Verbo Church and um they had a a a marvelous government. Christian
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evangelist Luis Pau told Christianity Today in 1983, "It's great to have a Christian president as a model. The hand of God appears to be upon him."
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Meanwhile, remember Catholic priests who supported indigenous rights were being assassinated, disappeared, and tortured along with countless other civilians.
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Rios Mont's rule was the logical end of a decadesl long project. Replace politically engaged Catholicism with a
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politically compliant Protestantism so that the structures of inequality remained untouched.
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Even today, evangelical Protestants in Latin America overwhelmingly support the same kinds of politicians which evangelical Protestants in the US support, authoritarian right-wingers.
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